I may be pessimistic, but I think that schools will still give a tip to legacy applicants even if they have said it won’t. Happy grads equal money.
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Legacy applicants already have advantages on average compared to the overall applicant pool:
- By definition, not first generation to college.
- Less likely to be in low income families, particularly if legacy at an elite private college (i.e. where their parents were more likely to go into very high income jobs like finance and consulting).
- Specific to legacy colleges that use level of interest, more immersed into the college culture and therefore better able to show interest and write a “why [this college]?” essay.
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Ivies don’t need rank and file alumnus money. Others, yeah.
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Small sample size of course! But mybpoint was legacies now are more socioeconomically diverse than prior legacies.
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Of course! They have to remain solvent in order to finance/etc. Why would they risk getting upside down? That would not be in anyone’s interest… Am I missing something?
Columbia ranks #47 in endowment per student. Brown is #37, UPenn is #31 and Dartmouth is #19. Cornell is #69 but does get some state money. There are schools that need money less than they do.
True, was thinking of personal experience with Yale. Still bitter about it.
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It’s been so interesting to see FGLI now worn as a badge of honor at some schools (like, literally - hats and sweatshirts with the FGLI association name/logo). So different than back in the day, as you say.
I have heard the same.
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Yep. As an African American who went to Penn for undergrad and then Brown for grad, I’m a bit torn. H (also AfAm) went to Bowdoin and then Brown. I think this article captures the conflict many of us have about legacy admissions:
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The selective colleges that are under the microscope for legacy admissions do not distinguish a difference between a 33 and 35 ACT. A 33/34 legacy applicants vs a 35/36 non-legacy (unhooked applicant), the legacy will win. The test optional policy allows the selective colleges to pick and choose and create their ideal class. Their ideal class includes legacies because if they thumb their nose at legacies, that is direct hit to their advancement goals. Legacy admissions needs to end!
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If thumbing their nose at legacy is a hit to universities’ advancement goal, why does “legacy admissions need to end”? Not following the logical thread here. Wouldn’t that be counterproductive from the perspective of these universities that advantage legacies?
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So what I was hypothesizing is they would likely have lower stats on average than the kids who would replace them, not admitted kids in general.
This hypothesis is based in part on the Princeton frosh survey, which showed non-legacies did have a higher percentage of 36s, but also higher percentages of 32 and lower scores. My basic modeling assumption is Princeton is largely already taking the lower-numbers non-legacy kids it wants, and if legacy preferences are eliminated it will largely just mean similar kids with marginally higher qualifications replace them.
Of course that is a lot of assumptions, and could be wrong. But I don’t think it is a bad bet.
This is a terrible example/hypothesis. You are only looking at 36s but this doesn’t hold true for 34-36 which is the score of 75% of legacy vs 63% non-legacy. Additionally ACTs are a smaller group to begin with so the sample size is small. The SAT data also shows that a larger percentage of the legacy group achieved the highest scores.
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Well right, if you lump things together like that you can miss the interesting relative concentration of legacies in the 33-35 range, with non-legacies having higher percentages above and below that range.
But again, people seem to think the point I was making was about comparing legacies to non-legacies as existing groups today.
Instead, the implicit question behind my hypothetical was what sorts of non-legacies are currently not getting admitted, but would get admitted if colleges like Princeton gave up legacy preferences.
I fully admit looking at who is currently enrolling does not really answer that question. It is actually a very hard question to answer, including because Princeton could change its other admissions policies in various ways.
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By the way, if we were serious about this, the first thing I think we would need to do is remove other hooked applicants. It is quite clear from the data that recruited athletes make up a very large portion of the lower-score distribution. We have less good data on socioeconomic and other diversity hooks, but I think we can use the score distributions by aid status as a proxy. And those with, say, full aid also skewed into lower scores, those receiving no aid skewed into higher scores.
And if it is true unhooked non-legacy admits already skew considerably higher in terms of test scores than hooked non-legacy admits, they would also skew higher than all non-legacy admits including the hooked and unhooked.
All this relevant to the sort of hypothetical I was constructing. Again, on a fundamental level we don’t know what Princeton and its peers would do if they abandoned legacy preferences, but I do think one plausible result is it would not change their policies as to recruited athletes, socioeconomic diversity, and so on. Meaning the marginal legacy admits, at least those who were not also hooked in some other way, would be replaced by other marginal unhooked admits (conversely, if you were, say, a recruited athlete and a legacy, you might not be replaced at all just because the legacy preference went away).
And then again I personally think it is at least a good bet that the non-legacies who would replace legacies would themselves skew higher than the current distribution of non-legacy admits. Again, basically this is just assuming Princeton is not going to add more recruited athlete slots, or change its policies/targets for diversity admits, or so on, just because it eliminated a legacy preference. Although it could, of course, we don’t know.
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To muddy the waters even further, in my neck of the woods, there is a lot of overlap with recruited athletes that are also legacies.
FWIW, I haven’t seen a “marginal” legacy admit in ages. (Lots of students bring their entire CV to alumni meetings ; )).
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Yeah, the colleges in question frequently say something like legacy preferences in practice make little difference these days.
The data in the Harvard lawsuit did indicate an effect, but it was the kind of thing that is pretty subtle in the sense that basically legacies had a higher admit rate than unhooked non-legacies with equivalent GPAs and test scores and other more objective qualifications. And even that is a messy observation because there could be differences in perceived course rigor, differences in other harder to measure things, and so on.
The background here is that even when you are looking at unhooked applicants with objectively very good numbers and some very good ECs, the actual admit rate at these colleges is still something like 25% from that pool, give or take. And it does look like maybe being a legacy with those qualifications significantly increases that 25% to something much higher. But, you may have to be in that pool to begin with, at least if you are an otherwise unhooked legacy (so not a recruited athlete, dean’s list, faculty kid, or so on). Or if not quite in that pool, the standards will not bend much these days.
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I think they would look remarkably similar to the legacies currently being admired - extremely bright, high achieving, high SES students, from highly educated households.
Interestingly, the class of 2027 is comprised of only 6% legacy students, almost half as many as last year, which was already slightly less than the years before that (according to the surveys).
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Exactly. But if legacy preferences are doing anything at all, then they should look like that but just a little more so, which was the gist of my now long-distant hypothetical.
And then the important question (to me) is whether thanks to the relevant parents now coming from the era of conscious diversity policies, would those two pools be identical in other ways?
Like, as another poster pointed out, presumably if these colleges are making good on their promises, legacies will in fact skew higher SES thanks to their parents having graduated from these colleges. But compared to all higher SES parents, might that history of conscious diversity policies make these graduates turned parents a little more diverse among higher SES parents generally? That was certainly part of the hope behind those policies, that they would help actually make a difference like that.
So I think it is an interesting question, and certainly some legacy parents are making the argument.
I have noted 2 common themes on this website:
#1 Where you go to college doesn’t matter. It is all about your hard work and effort. You will have the same career outcomes whether you go to a state university or an ivy league school.
#2 Highly selective schools that will continue to allow legacy admissions are wrong because this is really affirmative action for rich white kids.
I am assuming that most people on this site are aligned with those 2 points. If you think where someone goes to college doesn’t matter, why do you care if private universities have legacy admissions?
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